In Antiguo, a small barrio halfway up the winding slopes of San Sebastian, there are two schools separated by a towering white wall.
Josu Cuesta, a former pupil at Amor Misericordioso, is standing in the gravel car park that used to be his playground.
The school name has changed since, but in 1992 it was the place he started hearing whispers about an exceptional talent on the other side, at the neighbouring Jakintza primary.
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The plaster obscured their view but it fuelled the imagination of what existed in this other world. Cuesta, then 10 years old, was regaled by tales of the boy’s majesty with a football to the extent he and his friends would climb to catch a glimpse of the action on the unusual green cement pitch.
A few months later, Cuesta received a knock on the door from his neighbour, the president of the local youth team Antiguoko, inviting him to join training.
“There he was,” Cuesta tells The Athletic, recalling that moment with the same boyish thrill 32 years later.
“I saw for the first time that boy who was talked about so much: Mikel Arteta.
“The things he did with the ball were already so advanced, while the rest of us still had a hard time.
“After that first day, I didn’t want to return to the level I saw in that training. They only convinced me to come back by telling me that everyone was a year older than me, including Mikel.”
His old school, Amor Misericordioso, translates as “merciful love”, but there was little of that when it came to competition with Arteta.
On the other side of Heriz Pasealekua lies the next reference point in Arteta’s footballing journey. Elizbarrutiko Seminarioa, a catholic church which tended to the sick and looks over the entire western bank of the city, was the backdrop of Arteta’s first experiences of structured football.
A hilly road leads to a group of kids playing football on two pitches inside a cage, underneath a Soviet-like building in its brutalist, granite design.
Ten 20-metre-high concrete cylinders support a panoramic wall of windows that look out over San Sebastian, the coast shaped like a horseshoe.
“This was where we first played for Antiguoko,” says Mikel Yanguas, who is taking The Athletic on a tour of Arteta’s childhood.
Yanguas spent five years with Arteta at their local team before signing for Barcelona with him at 15 along with Jon Alvarez, who is now a first-team physiotherapist at the Catalan club.
Yanguas works in finance now and lives in a rural town further down the coast but his face lights up as he stands in the car park which used to house another two pitches.
“I was from a school in the old town but Antiguoko did not have its own ground and decided to collaborate with other schools, so six or seven schools travelled here to train,” Yanguas says.
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“It is my first time coming back here but I can still picture Mikel with the exact same hair. He was small but very agile and technical and he always knew which pass to play rather than dribbling.
“We used to play another popular sport here, which is Basque pelota. Rather than using a racquet, we used only our hand to hit this really hard ball against the big wall. Your hands would be red by the end!
“Mikel was good at every sport. He was good at ping pong too!”
Arteta’s sporting prowess led to him attending Real Club Tenis de San Sebastian, the city’s main tennis club situated at the very end of the Ondarreta strip — the area that lies below Antiguo.
Next door, there is a Wimbledon-themed pub packed with artefacts but it was not Arteta’s first taste of London as it was only built in 1998.
Jon Castellano and Jose Luis Jimenez are still coaching at the club, which now boasts 500 members from the age of four upwards, but they remember a 10-year-old Arteta starting what could have been a fruitful tennis journey.
“At his age group, he was at a high level. There were about 12 or 13 boys in each age group and he was in the top few,” says Castellano.
“He had great coordination in everything he did. He had all the shots and was a tactical player because he was small.
“But he did not play in the competition groups as he only trained on Monday and Friday. The weekends were for football.”
The club produced Lara Arruabarrena, who reached No 52 in the world in 2017 and also developed Ane Mintegi Del Olmo, who became the girls’ singles champion at Wimbledon in 2021.
Could they have had another professional on their books with Arteta?
“When he was 13, he had to choose tennis or football — I think he made the right decision!” says Castellano, laughing.
“His temperament is better for team sports. When he was young, his personality could be difficult. When he made a mistake, he would get very angry with himself as he was very competitive.”
Cuesta remembers the same spirit bubbling under when playing with Antiguoko — or when they used to tease Arteta that he looked like a famous Spanish bullfighter Fran Rivera.
“I was surprised by how competitive it was,” says Cuesta. “From a very young age, he was a born winner. He didn’t like losing — not even when we were riding a bike.
“One day, we were racing up the hill to the Igueldo lighthouse and I cheated. I said, ‘My bike has broken’, and when everyone stopped I started climbing like crazy to the finish line.
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“Just to see Mikel angry behind me was worth it.”
Cuesta remembers their first game against Real Sociedad, the club ubiquitous throughout the city, with flags hanging out of windows on virtually every block of flats.
Antiguoko hosted the professional club at their home ground in Berio. It is a very different complex now with its kempt gardens, seven-a-side astroturf cage and 11-a-side pitch underneath the mountains behind the far goal.
When Arteta was involved in that famous game for Antiguoko, he played where the flower beds now lie. Back then, it was gravel.
“He was by far the best player of all that day, even though he did not score,” says Cuesta.
“I think Yanguas scored two goals that day but we played a 3-4-1-2 with Mikel as the No 10. He could step on the ball and do anything, even though it was a gravel field.
“There is a videotape I have seen 100 times of the game. I remember he did a roulette on the left wing, controlled the ball and passed it between the defence. Mikel was different from the rest.”
His coach Roberto Montiel recalls another story from that day, which helped put Antiguoko on the map as a talent hub for Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao.
Arteta “slalomed” past the entire team and if he slotted home he would finish as top goalscorer. Instead, he squared the ball to his team-mate to tap it in.
“I coached (Andoni) Iraola and (Xabi) Alonso’s team, who were a year older, but I watched Arteta from the very first day,” says Oscar Landa.
“As soon as he arrived, we moved him up to play with Alonso. We finished the competition in first position ahead of Bilbao and Sociedad — and Mikel was clearly the best.
“He was very intelligent. When you were thinking ‘do that’, he did it.”
Arteta became close friends with his team-mates Yosu Martinez Alvaro Parra, Alvaro Vazquez, Jaime Sobrino and Cuesta. They had their first parties together as teenagers and attended the San Sebastian festival together as one of their first outings.
They travelled all across Europe playing tournaments against professional teams and invariably came out on top. The parents, including the Artetas, also travelled, which helped forge a lasting bond.
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Cuesta treasures a picture from a tournament in France where Arteta can be seen in the thick of a pre-match war cry.
“We used to make: ‘Aupa, Antiguiko, aupa!’, which was led by the captain Aitor Esnaola.
“Mikel did not have the armband but he was already a coach when he was 12 years old. He directed and saw holes where no one saw them. He gesticulated to the rest of us how and where to stand.”
Now, members of that Antiguo team have a WhatsApp group called ‘Legends’ in which they regularly discuss Arteta’s achievements with Arsenal. He is not part of it but Cuesta’s last contact with his old friend had special significance.
“Mikel and I lost contact due to distance, but the day my father (Jesus Mari) died he wrote to me, 20 years after not having contact,” says Cuesta.
“I would like to thank him again as I was very excited to see his message. Our years together were wonderful.”
Yanguas was a very different character to Arteta. He was tall, angular, the goalscorer; Arteta was slight, wily, the conductor.
Both attracted the attention of Bilbao when they were 14, though.
“For a whole year, I used to have lunch in his house with his mother and then we would be picked up in a taxi to go to Bilbao training,” says Yanguas.
“We did that four days a week, leaving after school and getting back late at night. We had a fantastic coach in (Jose Luis) Mendilibar (current Olympiakos manager), who was very close to the players.”
But it got to April of that season and they had not signed with Bilbao. Yanguas and Arteta were picked to play for the Gipuzkoa select team in a tournament against Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Barcelona contacted their parents and soon the boys found themselves in an office seeking agent representation to help make their dream move a reality.
Barca made a professional pitch to the parents about La Masia and how they would nurture their sons but, had Arteta chosen Bilbao, it is felt by those involved at the time the deal for the other two players may have fallen through.
Arteta was the gem and he excelled in Barcelona. Yanguas, meanwhile, desperately struggled.
“It was really difficult for me. I couldn’t sleep, so I was going to school the next day very tired and then had to try to play,” says Yanguas.
“I was so homesick, I cried a lot in my room. I only stayed there for one year because it was a really bad experience for me. I never told Mikel about how upset I was, as I am quite closed with my feelings.
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“It was different for Mikel. He was very open and spoke a lot with everyone. He had a better ability to form relationships. His mentality was very strong. You could see even then that he was 100 per cent convinced about his capacity to play and succeed.”
Yanguas also spent hours with Arteta at a packed La Concha beach — where Arteta’s uncle was a keen surfer — when the tide was out.
His father still lives in Antiguo but Arteta’s only time playing senior football in Spain came during an ill-fated six months at his boyhood club Sociedad in 2004.
He felt at odds with the manager and his role within the team and quickly took control of his career, asking for a way out. Perhaps it is why players like Alonso and Iraola seem more present in the minds of locals as they rose into the first teams of Bilbao and Sociedad, spending a significant part of their careers there.
Arteta visits Antiguoko every so often to help inspire the next generation, but his transfer was the first building block in helping Antiguoko establish the facility they now have.
Since their foundation in 1982, 40 players have become professionals, with Ander Barrenetxea and Sociedad captain Martin Zubimendi another two of their alumni.
Thoughts of creating a senior team still linger but Bilbao and Sociedad remain in a tug-of-war over Antiguoko’s pipeline, with the former currently enjoying a 10-year agreement for first refusal on the best talents.
Bilbao have already agreed deals for four players to join next season and their regional youth scout Aitor Ayerza is in attendance at Antiguoko’s training, as part of their deal gives them unlimited access to track the players closely.
There are high hopes for 15-year-old Inigo Sainz De Lecinana, another skilful midfielder who committed to Bilbao in January.
He is playing two years above his age group at times, but will there ever be a talent that caught the imagination of Landa and Montiel quite like Arteta? They simply laugh and shake their heads.
(Top photo: Tony Marshall/Empics via Getty Images)
